After years of mediocrity and weak sales, Microsoft is finally killing off its Zune media player, Bloomberg reports.

This is the right move. Microsoft should be focusing all of its portable-gadget efforts on Windows Phone 7, to try and compete with Apple and Google there.
And anyway, the Zune's software is what has actually been semi-well-regarded over the years, and the best parts of that can be shoehorned into WP7 and the Xbox.

(The Zune's hardware, meanwhile, has always felt like a bad knockoff of last year's iPod.) Microsoft will continue to sell existing versions of the Zune, Bloomberg reports, but will not introduce new ones.

The Zune was suppose to be the iPod killer. I wonder how the WP7 will look 4 years from now as well.

Just like killing off the iPod line helped the iPhone so much. Oh wait...

No, you silly. iPod, iPhone, and iPad all run iOS. They cooperate instead of compete with each other because the same software runs across all 3 platforms.

The Zune media player OS and Windows Phone 7 are separate operating systems - software for both platforms are not cross-compatible. Thus, if WP7 is successful, it doesn't help the existing Zune players and vice-versa. But the plan (many assume) is to start a line of media players that run WP7, thus strengthening the WP7 line and consolidating resources. It's the best thing Microsoft could do in order to compete with iOS.

True, Microsoft's 7th phone runs its own OS (the 6 previous phones must have been abysmal failures as I never heard of any of them). But only the iPod Touch runs iOS. The other, lowly, shitty iPods run something else. The Zune wasn't really a competitor to the iPod Touch, but more so to those lower, more shitty iPods. However I agree, MS shouldn't focus on the Zune.